Convert More Niche Leads by Developing Buyer Personas

Posted January 24, 2017byKelly Benson

In this article, you’re going to learn about developing buyer personas for your niche internet life insurance business.

Life insurance agents have an incredible advantage against other professions when it comes to understanding their customers. When selling a policy you gain intimate knowledge of a person’s medical and family history, their lifestyle choices, and more.

For agents selling online, this type of information becomes invaluable when it’s coupled with analytic data. Collectively, the insights that can be gleaned from digital tools and your own experience as an agent, can elevate your sales and marketing game and help you deliver incredible value to your target audience.

Unfortunately, many agents don’t take the time to really research their customers. Despite having plenty of information readily available to them. They approach their marketing with a one-size-fits-all approach and then grumble when their lead conversion numbers are sub-optimal.

Perhaps that’s because agents aren’t quite sure what information to look at and how to package it up into an actionable format.

This is where buyer personas come in.

What is a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are a fictional representation of your target audience that helps you attract and relate to your customers. They help you identify who your “perfect prospect” is, where they spend time online, what pain points they have, and how you can best help them. That way, when they land on your website, they are greeted with open arms in the form of perfectly targeted content.

Personas go beyond simply demographics of age, income, and education level. They dive deep into the needs, behaviors, desires and concerns of different groups. By developing buyer personas for your niche audience, you can tailor your products, services, and content to your target market in a way that resonates with them.

Why does a life insurance agent need buyer personas?

If you’re selling life insurance online as an independent agent, chances are you are targeting a particular niche. After all, having a targeted audience is the number one way to remain competitive against large independent agencies. It is also the best way to serve your customers, as explained in our previous post “3 Reasons to be a Niche Life Insurance Agent.”

No matter which niche you’ve chosen, whether it’s diabetics, veterans, or people with osteoporosis, you will need to gain a thorough understanding of your audience in order to convert them into sales.

Simply put, developing buyer personas for your internet life insurance business will ensure that your marketing efforts are targeted towards the right audience, which in turn, will convert more visitors and lead to more sales.

Specifically, here are three reasons why you need buyer personas for every lead generating life insurance site you create:

It helps you create stories

The ultimate goal of creating personas is to give you such a clear understanding of who your audience is, that you can weave stories around them. For example, if you know you’re selling to families with young children, then you can visually tell a story by choosing the right images for your site. You can create ads that feature children playing in a park. And then write messaging that talks about the need to be a provider for your family.

It guides your content creation

When it comes to blogging and content creation, buyer personas will enhance your writing and give you crystal clear direction. From the copy of your website homepage to the blog posts and articles you write answering your prospects toughest questions, personas will help you write better and faster.

Personas will also help you write in more of a conversational tone, which your audience will relate to and find welcoming. As marketer Neil Patel says, “A persona gives clarity, power, and passion to your writing. You will find that when you’re thinking of your persona and writing to them, your style of writing will really come alive.”

Informs marketing and sales strategies

Personas can help you make decisions beyond content writing. By developing several personas for your niche, you can segment and deliver personalized messages to each. You can create unique funnels for each person. Send them to a specific landing page, and then capture identifying information using an insights-packed program like NinjaQuoter. Knowing which landing pages convert your visitors into leads can then help you on the phone.

Enhances social media interactions

Social media is a critical component to a well-rounded digital presence. Although it’s not a main source for generating leads, it’s still an avenue to interact with prospects. With personas, engaging with people on social media will be more human and less corporate.

How to create buyer personas

With a combination of analysis and research, you can easily create effective buyer personas. They are one part science and one part art. It can include surveys, interviews, and good old fashion data mining from the forms on your site and analytics. The best way to get a well-rounded view of your audience is to include customers you’ve already sold a policy to, prospects, and those outside your contacts database who might fit with your audience.

No matter your niche, you should develop several buyer personas so you can get an accurate and comprehensive view of your audience.

Even with a niche focus, developing multiple personas is helpful because chances are there are subsets within your niche.

As an example, you may be selling to diabetics, but those diabetics may range in age, lifestyles, and backgrounds. You may have diabetics who live a really healthy lifestyle and others who do not. Each of those would be an individual persona.

Here are 3 ways to gather information on your target audience:

Check your website analytics to see how traffic came to your site, what keywords were used, and what actions they took with your content.

Look at past interactions with members of your target audience, and keep a journal with new insights moving forward. For example, write down questions they ask, concerns they have, and hopes and priorities they mention. Remember, life insurance is emotional, and many people will be generous with their thoughts.

Interview customers and prospects when you’re on the phone with them or over email. Ask questions about the niche group that they fall into so you can better segment your prospects moving forward.

As you collect information about your buyers, remember to think beyond typical demographics. Think in terms of hopes, priorities, and desires. It is this information that will help you market to them in a meaningful way.

For a detailed list of survey and interview techniques, check outthis article by HubSpot, the go-to leader for user personas and inbound marketing.

What does a life insurance buyer persona look like

How detailed a buyer persona gets is totally up to you and the target market. At a minimum, any persona should include their background, demographics, goals, challenges, values, fears, and the marketing message that you’ll deliver. Depending on your research you can go even further and include real quotes, identifying characteristics, and common objections.

Below is an example of a buyer persona for an avid recreational scuba diver:

Buyers change, so do personas

Remember, buyer personas are not fixed. They are an ever evolving aspect of doing business with humans. As technology changes, so do buying habits and trends. This couldn’t be more evident than the rise of the internet life insurance agent. Also as time goes on, medical advancements, changes, and trends also affect the way people shop for life insurance.

The key takeaway here, never stop evolving your buyer personas. Set up bi-monthly meetings to review them. And be sure to always take notes when you’re talking to your actual buyers on the phones. At the end of the day, the more you know about your buyers, the more people will actually buy from you.

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Ninja Quoter is all about marketing. It was built by agents, for agents. In today's environment, agents shouldn't rely on old school marketing and lead capture processes, because consumers are catching on to the old tactics. Ninja Quoter is the next generation of quote engines for both agents in the field, and for consumers online. No matter what we do, we focus on conversions. Period.